I have no idea about Mint or these new fangled distributions.
Just now Debian is switching over to the systemd init system. There is a big debate going on as to whether that is a good idea or not. If that starts to annoy me enough it might be time to get back to building my own style Linux OS from scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/.
LFS worked very well back in the late 1990's but all that downloading over a 14,400 modem and compiling on a 100MHz 486 was a bit too much. Updating as time goes by was an issue. Today though things are a thousand times faster and we have file systems with roll backs so that bad updates can be undone easily.
Just in case remember you can use dropbox under Linux, in case you are using it...
If you install wine (windows emulator) you can also use a fair amount of windows software, including diptrace.
Ok so now I want to make a copy of an sd card. I did some searching on Google and here is what I tried so far:
I found the sd card by this command in terminal:
fdisk -l
It shows me the hard drive and the sd card. The sd card (8GB) must be in 3 partitions?
Disk /dev/sdf: 7892 MB, 7892631552 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 240864 cylinders, total 15415296 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00035c96
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 8192 3011718 1501763+ e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
/dev/sdf2 3014656 15349759 6167552 85 Linux extended
/dev/sdf3 15349760 15415295 32768 83 Linux
So now I want to make an identical image of this card to hard drive so I can make a copy so I tried this:
cat /dev/sdf/ > ~/backup.iso
It doesn't like that. I get this message: cat: /dev/sdf/: Not a directory
What am I doing wrong? And yes I was in superuser mode (sudo su).
Ok so now I want to make a copy of an sd card. I did some searching on Google and here is what I tried so far:
I found the sd card by this command in terminal:
fdisk -l
It shows me the hard drive and the sd card. The sd card (8GB) must be in 3 partitions?
Disk /dev/sdf: 7892 MB, 7892631552 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 240864 cylinders, total 15415296 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00035c96
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 8192 3011718 1501763+ e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
/dev/sdf2 3014656 15349759 6167552 85 Linux extended
/dev/sdf3 15349760 15415295 32768 83 Linux
So now I want to make an identical image of this card to hard drive so I can make a copy so I tried this:
cat /dev/sdf/ > ~/backup.iso
It doesn't like that. I get this message: cat: /dev/sdf/: Not a directory
What am I doing wrong? And yes I was in superuser mode (sudo su).
I'm not entirely sure if I follow what you're trying to do exactly so forgive me if I'm way off.
Sounds like the tool for what you want to do is the "dd" command.
Something like this: dd if=/dev/sdf of=/root/sd.dmp
This will make an image of the sd card. When that finishes eject the source sd card and put in the new card. Then copy the image file back to the new sd card with dd: dd if=/root/sd.dmp of=/dev/sdf
I'm not entirely sure if I follow what you're trying to do exactly so forgive me if I'm way off.
Sounds like the tool for what you want to do is the "dd" command.
Something like this: dd if=/dev/sdf of=/root/sd.dmp
This will make an image of the sd card. When that finishes eject the source sd card and put in the new card. Then copy the image file back to the new sd card with dd: dd if=/root/sd.dmp of=/dev/sdf
4x5- I also tried your method. Evidently it copied it to the root folder of which I don't seem to have access to. It says access denied. I'm going to try and see if I can delete the file.
4x5- I also tried your method. Evidently it copied it to the root folder of which I don't seem to have access to. It says access denied. I'm going to try and see if I can delete the file.
I should have been a bit more clear. You didn't have to use the filename and path I had in my example.
Also when you ran the dd command you made use of features and functionality very unique to unix. The first is the dd command itself. As you may have guessed "if=" specifies the input file and "of=" specifies the output file. In the way I usually use dd is very to the command. If you take a look at the man page for dd you'll see how many options there are for it. What dd does in this case is read a byte at a time from the input file and writes it to the output file until it gets to the end of the input or output file.
As you will remember in unix everything is a file. When you put in a thumbdrive, sd card, cd/dvd disk it is mapped to something in the /dev dir (actually that's not really true but it's close enough for now ). In your case /dev/sdf refers to the entire card and if there were partitions on the card you would have seen entrees with a number at the end. That number indicates the partition number (I'm oversimplifying a little but for now don't worry about it). So /dev/sdf1 would reference the first partition, etc. Since you specified /dev/sdf the boot sector, partition table, etc was copied.
Comments
I have no idea about Mint or these new fangled distributions.
Just now Debian is switching over to the systemd init system. There is a big debate going on as to whether that is a good idea or not. If that starts to annoy me enough it might be time to get back to building my own style Linux OS from scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/.
LFS worked very well back in the late 1990's but all that downloading over a 14,400 modem and compiling on a 100MHz 486 was a bit too much. Updating as time goes by was an issue. Today though things are a thousand times faster and we have file systems with roll backs so that bad updates can be undone easily.
If you install wine (windows emulator) you can also use a fair amount of windows software, including diptrace.
Massimo
I found the sd card by this command in terminal:
fdisk -l
It shows me the hard drive and the sd card. The sd card (8GB) must be in 3 partitions?
Disk /dev/sdf: 7892 MB, 7892631552 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 240864 cylinders, total 15415296 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00035c96
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 8192 3011718 1501763+ e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
/dev/sdf2 3014656 15349759 6167552 85 Linux extended
/dev/sdf3 15349760 15415295 32768 83 Linux
So now I want to make an identical image of this card to hard drive so I can make a copy so I tried this:
cat /dev/sdf/ > ~/backup.iso
It doesn't like that. I get this message: cat: /dev/sdf/: Not a directory
What am I doing wrong? And yes I was in superuser mode (sudo su).
Something like:
dd if=/dev/sdf of=imagefilename.img
Then you can put that image on a new SD card:
dd if=imagefilename.img of=/dev/sdf
dd has a bunch of options than you might want to investigate a bit, number of blocks to copy, block sizes etc.
Notice the weird syntax of the options to dd. That is some historical oddity.
The error with cat is because you have a trailing slash.
Now, I have no idea why cat cannot work instead of dd for this task. Never thought about it before...may be it even does. Time for an experiment....
I'm not entirely sure if I follow what you're trying to do exactly so forgive me if I'm way off.
Sounds like the tool for what you want to do is the "dd" command.
Something like this: dd if=/dev/sdf of=/root/sd.dmp
This will make an image of the sd card. When that finishes eject the source sd card and put in the new card. Then copy the image file back to the new sd card with dd: dd if=/root/sd.dmp of=/dev/sdf
4x5- I also tried your method. Evidently it copied it to the root folder of which I don't seem to have access to. It says access denied. I'm going to try and see if I can delete the file.
Or use "su" to get root privs and do what you have to do. Then "exit" to get back to being your normal user.
Oh by the way, there may be some room for confusion here:
There is a "root" user that has a home directory of "/root". As opposed to normal users who have their home directories in /home/whateverUserName
Then there is the idea of the root of your file system space which is "/". The "root" directory. From which all other files can be found.
Note: Unix does not separate drives out like C:
I should have been a bit more clear. You didn't have to use the filename and path I had in my example.
Also when you ran the dd command you made use of features and functionality very unique to unix. The first is the dd command itself. As you may have guessed "if=" specifies the input file and "of=" specifies the output file. In the way I usually use dd is very to the command. If you take a look at the man page for dd you'll see how many options there are for it. What dd does in this case is read a byte at a time from the input file and writes it to the output file until it gets to the end of the input or output file.
As you will remember in unix everything is a file. When you put in a thumbdrive, sd card, cd/dvd disk it is mapped to something in the /dev dir (actually that's not really true but it's close enough for now